Untitled Quiz

LING 100 Week 10: Language and Society

• Homework 1 grades released by November 9
• Exam 2 grades released by November 11
• Homework 2 published

Sociolinguistics

• Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics that studies the relationship between language and society
• Key questions include:
  • What are the social functions of language?
  • How does language convey social meaning?
  • How do languages work within communities?
  • How do people convey and construct aspects of their social identity through language?
• Sociolinguistic norms are a set of social conventions shared by a group of people in their language use

Solidarity and Power

• Even when conversation participants share sociolinguistic norms, the conversation may be unbalanced, influenced by the speakers' relative status
• Status: a person's social position in relation to others
• Participants may signal closeness (solidarity) or social standing (power)

Solidarity/Power Differences

• Diagrams illustrating solidarity/power differences in various scenarios (e.g., a father and his four-year-old son, an undergraduate student and the Dean, childhood best friend, unfamiliar SFU student) provide examples of how conversations reflect these relationships

Forms of Address

• Social factors such as the occasion, social status/rank, gender, age, family relationships, occupational hierarchy, transactional status, and intimacy influence how people address each other
• Different methods include:
  • First name
  • Last name
  • Full name
  • Nicknames
  • Title/honorifics (e.g., Dr., Mr., Ms.)
  • Terms of endearment
  • Kinship terms
• Examples of forms of address with Ross Geller

Forms of Address: Pronouns

• In English, using "you" as a pronoun is standard regardless of the distance between interlocutors
• Other languages may use formal and informal pronouns to reflect status and relationship
• Examples (Latin, French, German, Italian, Spanish) showing the different T (informal) and V (formal) forms

Forms of Address: Honorifics

• Honorifics encode social status and express respect and courtesy
• English honorifics (e.g., Mr., Ms., Dr., Professor) precede names
• Japanese honorifics are more complex and nuanced (e.g., -san, -kun, -sama, -senpai, -sensei, -shi, -chan)

Conversation Analysis

• Conversation analysis goes beyond facts and considers how relationships are built and maintained, and how conversations shape social reality
• Conversation analysis (or ethnomethodology) studies how conversations are structured

Turn-Taking

• Turn-taking is an essential part of conversation structure where one person listens while the other speaks
• This is a universal characteristic of all societies
• Examples in ceremonies/formal debates.
• It is not determined in advance in ordinary conversations
• Linguistic and non-verbal cues signal the end of a speaking turn (e.g., addressing the other person, lowering pitch, expressions, releasing posture/gesturing with a hand)
• Cultural norms affect how long pauses are acceptable and how much overlap occurs

Interruptions

• Types of interruptions:
  • Cooperative: a partner supplies a missing word or phrase (e.g., "Well I'm not- I'm not fro-, London")
  • Intrusive: aims to disagree or change topic.
• Examples of the different kinds of interruptions

Interruptions/Overlap

• Gender and language research from the 1970s observed that women tend to get interrupted more, but more contemporary research recognizes the linkage to power dynamics and solidarity
• Backchanneling, a form of interruption/overlap, involves expressing attention/understanding/agreement without interrupting the speaker's turn

Hedges

• Hedges (e.g., "I think it will rain a little bit") make statements less assertive, expressing probability, caution, or indecisiveness
• Women use hedges more than men, especially in situations with a large power difference.

Repair

• Common "troubles" in conversations include false starts, stammering, errors, and corrections
• Types of repair:
  • Other-initiated repair (listener intervenes)
  • Self-repair (speaker clarifies/corrects)

Assignment 3

• Analyze a 2-3-minute unscripted conversation from a sociolinguistic perspective using conversation analysis.
• Instructions posted on Canvas

Key Terms

• Accent: Differences in pronunciation (e.g., tomato vs. tomato)
• Dialect: Differences in pronunciation, lexical items (words), and syntax (sentence structure).
• Idiolect: Unique characteristics of an individual speaker's language use.
• “Standard” and “non-standard” varieties of a language:
  • Power relationship with the standard language—often the one used in formal learning and media
  • Variety of regional, ethnicity, and socioeconomic characteristics (e.g., Standard American English, Standard Canadian English).

Variables Influencing Linguistic Variation

• Time, place, contact, isolation, and community variables (like class, gender, and ethnicity) influence linguistic variation.

Sociolinguistics: A Few Terms

• Sociolinguistic markers are noticeable linguistic variables with social meaning (e.g., syllable-final /r/, -ing pronunciations).
• Variations in pronunciation (e.g., rhoticity in North America vs. England) have implied social meanings.
• Sociolinguistic variables are features of language that people use unconsciously to indicate their social identity.

Regional Variation

• Differences in language use across specific geographical regions. This refers both to pronunciation and vocabulary.
• Examples of words/phrases used in BC, Newfoundland.

Canadianisms

• Words/phrases that are uniquely Canadian.
• Examples: toque, garburator, Kraft Dinner, supper, running shoes (also includes pronunciation variations called "Canadian Raising" and "Prevelar [ae] Raising")

Regionalism

• Language variants displaying strong regional differences in their lexicon.

Other Notes

• Additional information on different aspects of sociolinguistics.
• Included are specific examples for better understanding.